Wednesday, June 24, 2009

PCLinuxOS! Wow!

It seems that I blog in fits and starts. I get excited about Linux and, day after day, shout to the world through this blog about how terrific it is! Then deadlines loom and I find myself withdrawing from the bloog and needing to be at my drawing table.

So, my drawing table called and, for the past two months, I've been cartooning and running Georgetoon.com. (If you don't see George or my other comics in your local paper, ask for them!)

I don't know exactly how it happened. I guess I just wanted to have new OS on my laptop. I was dual booting between Windows XP and Kiowa Linux. While Kiowa Linux gets ready to release its latest and greatest, I decided to try a new Linux distro. And I wanted something similar to the look and feel of Kiowa and Mandriva. Well, that's why I loaded PCLinuxOS. And I'm so glad I did.

PCLinuxOS loaded in a snap, found all my hardware, configured my graphics card, and presented me with a number of wireless drivers to install. I selected the first one and my wireless came right up!

The extras bonus in all this was the PCLinuxOS forum and community. A really terrific, friendly bunch of folks who are welcoming and ready to help! I had no problems correcting minor issues because i had the help and support of the PCLinuxOS forum.

So, do yourself a favor and buy or download PCLInuxOS 2009.1! I'll be talking about it in the days and weeks to come. If you run the Live CD (or even install) you can follow along!

For those that don't think it's a friendly forum, it's because the forum is moderated well to keep everyone behaved and politics out. Anyone trying to misbehave or talk politics won't like the atmosphere. That's their own fault. The rules are well posted and well known. If someone chooses to ignore that, then they're on their own and have no right to gripe about it.

Everyone else loves the tone and friendliness of the forum because they keep it in check. There won't be anyone there telling you to read some manual, or that you're dumb because you don't know how to use 'grep'. People politely help you and encourage you to help others. There is also plenty of laid back discussion about all kinds of topics. It's almost addicting to spend time there.

We all know the rules but sometimes we like to break them as a service to the moderators so they feel they are useful :-)

The truth is: is a family forum, I have a 12 year old son who likes to hang around and learn from the posts to experiment in his laptop and I'm very grateful with the moderators, they do an excellent job.

beware pclinuxos gnome edition. The gnome edition is great for those who are tired of the stagnant kde3 series of desktop environments and know that kde wont be good until kde 4.3.

Pclinuxos gnome edition suffers from poor hardware support in favor of shoving a lot of programs onto the iso. Wireless support on a dell laptop and an eeepc is in the tubes. Not to mention no ability to use my quickcam communicate. Sure everything's in the repos for drivers. But, talk about a lot of after post installation drivers just for enough room on a cd for crappy stuff like an ipod manager, non existant office software, and other stuff like a last.fm program. Hardware should come first, programs are much easier to install from the repos than setting up drivers from the repos.

I admit, I'm not a big Gnome power user. But I do have Ubuntu Hardy on my rack system as well as Kiowa Linux' Beta Gnome edition. Gnome does certain things quite well. I just prefer KDE. For me, KDE is much more customizable and comfortable.

But, that's the beauty of Linux! You can choose what works best for you!:)

So, I can't comment on the reliability of PCLinuxOS' Gnome edition. But I've found PCLinuxOS KDE to be very complete, reliable, and stable.

As far as KDE 4.3 goes, I'm looking forward to seeing it in action. But, I'm in no hurry. KDE 3.5 works fine for em.:) I've used Kubuntu 9.04 on a thumb drive. Kubuntu 9.04 uses KDE 4.0. So, I've had a chance to give it a test run. Dolphin is a neat file manager.